February 18, 2007

Style: Murfin and Ray Week 4

"Used generally, the way in which a literary work is written, the devices the author uses to express his or her thoughts and convey the work's subject matter...Style, however, is as elusive to define as it is to identify and analyze a paricular work or a group of works" (Murfin and Ray 463).

Style is a very important component toward a formalist criticism, but because it is so difficult to identify, it is very hard to make a formalist critique on a piece of literature. What is very interesting is that a formalist piece of writing can be associated with an authorial or historical criticism because the style that an author uses can be associated with the identification from the literary critic. Style is so very difficult to pinpoint, so I am assuming that the best way is to depict a piece of style to the author and the intention, or maybe just try to appreciate the style and try to make an educated guess on why an author would use that style.